Section 125 of the United States Internal Revenue Code offers tax savings to employees for medical, dependent care and childcare expenses. Likewise, Section 132 of the United States Internal Revenue Code offers employees tax savings for work-related parking and transportation expenses. For example, employees may be entitled to tax benefits if the employees withhold a portion of their payroll to pay for medical, dependent care, childcare, work-related parking expenses and/or work-related transportation expenses. In other words, the employees' payroll is taxed on the amount left after the withheld portion is subtracted from the payroll amount and the withheld portion is placed into a flexible spending account (FSA).
A FSA is an account set up to hold the withheld portions, and to pay for certain categories of items that qualify for pre-tax treatment under the Internal Revenue Service Guidelines. As it currently stands, if an employee wishes to, for example, establish both a FSA for qualifying childcare expenses and a FSA for qualifying medical expenses, the employee must establish two FSAs and designate how much of the employee payroll to withhold and credit to each FSA. The employee may then withdraw the funds held in each FSA as the employee purchases qualifying items associated with each respective FSA.
Currently, to withdraw funds held in a FSA for qualifying expenses, the employee typically must first purchase the qualifying item, then request the FSA administrator to reimburse the employee for the purchase. More specifically, the employee is usually required to pay for the item at the point of sale, complete and file a claim form along with the sales receipt, wait for the FSA administrator to process and approve the claim, and wait to receive reimbursement. Thus, the current process for withdrawing FSA funds for qualifying expenses is time consuming, requires the employee to be “out of pocket” until reimbursement arrives, and necessitates that the employee perform various tasks after the purchase. Furthermore, in situations where the employee incurs a claim for expenses in different types of FSAs (e.g., a medical expense FSA and a childcare FSA), the employee is generally required to file two claims, one for each respective FSA, following the above steps.
Thus, there is a need for systems and methods for automatically accessing funds held in a FSA at the point of sale, and specifically, by utilizing a single payment instrument (e.g., a debit card, credit card, charge card, FSA card, RFID, etc.) at the point of sale. In addition, there is a need to access multiple FSAs for different categories of qualifying items utilizing a single payment instrument. Furthermore, there is a need for accessing one or more FSAs and/or one or more non-FSAs utilizing a single payment instrument.